Comment by yreg
6 years ago
This is interesting to me. In central Europe, or at least my country, the serious media keep very high standards.
Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
I find our independent media to be a key element of our democracy and I am worried when I hear the US media don't work quite the same.
Edit: I thought I might as well reply with our solutions to your bullet points
- Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist. The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians.
- The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society. (+ ads ofc)
- If one wants power to change things the far superior strategy in my country is to do the actual politics and not to report on it.
A very eye-opening event for me was when I visited Berlin in 2003 (?). We watched ZDF (government-financed German TV) news and saw a huge crowd protesting against Bush’s war in Iraq. Wanting to join them, we found a mostly empty square with a much smaller group of protestors standing in a triangle-formation in front of the cameras, which were setup such that the crowd would appear massive on TV.
So if you think European media are free of political bias and distortions, think again.
Not to detract from your point, but there have been big protests against the Iraq war in Europe. I was there.
My grievance is more how the media, including the government financed ones swallowed said war.
I don't particularly think that German media is anything better, but let's not fall into the anecdote=data trap.
Yes, let's not fall into anecdata trap and wait for quality data why should we blindly trust media.
I know nothing of ZDF, but right now our state public tv is also in a very bad shape.
It used to have high quality, but in the previous government period one of the ruling parties changed the management and now it's not objective at all. In fact, all the respected journalists left for other media and the reputation of the organisation is tarnished (polls show people don't trust it anymore).
Fortunately we have independent media as well.
Independent objective media are the lifeblood of democracy. You literally cannot have a healthy democracy without a strong and independent fourth estate.
For a long time I underestimated how much of a bedrock requirement this is. It's easy to dismiss the media as entertainment at best or noise at worst.
But at best they model fairness, balance, and rationality, and if you have no one doing that in public the quality of discourse soon crashes.
I often wonder if the news/media has been purposefully weakened as an institution over time, so as to keep the populace more ignorant and controllable by people in power.
I guess it goes in cycles though. Apparently in the 1890s it was _actually worse_!?
I don't think the media has been weakened. I think that the media has always been this bad. Perhaps even worse. The public just didn't know about it, because it was a lot harder to verify the facts through other means.
Same here but eastern Europe. Heck, American newspapers even endorse candidates which I find insane, it's like psychiatrists encouraging suicide.
> The newspaper as an organisation is equally hostile to all the politicians
The news (public service) I consume from time to time does this too. However while they try to not favor a particular political side they often instead fail towards trying to find dissent where there is none.
They invite some people with supposedly “opposing” views and then spend the time trying to provoke a fight. Usually it’s just people highlighting different perspectives with no interest in representing some kind of conflict over the matter.
Would you mind sharing which country are you talking about? I'm from another country in central Europe and the situation is same as in the USA or western Europe.
I'm talking about Slovak SME, Denník N, Aktuality, HN, Markíza and Czech DVTV and Reflex.
Ok, I'm not expert on Slovak media, but quick search shows that SME is owned by Penta (Gorilla), HN by Andrej Babis (Berlusconi-like figure), Dennik N is listed on wikipedia as newspaper having liberal slant, Reflex liberal-conservative slant, Markiza is noted as historically being criticized for being against former owner enemies (owner changed, but did journalists?), DVTV as internet tv isn't great example of mainstream medium, also just cursory search revealed that one of their moderators, Emma Smetana, is well known for not being exactly professional.
The fact that you consider those media unbiased doesn't mean they are really unbiased. Plenty of people consider Fox News and Huffington Post as paragons of objectivity.
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Out of curiosity, for Central European media, how many of them reported on the damning half-dozen OPCW leaks[0] that create turbulence for Central European foreign policy in Syria?
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/11/new-leaks-shatter-opcws-a...
The BBC didn't even mention it, at least not initially.
The Guardian article mentioned Russia 5 or 6 times (why?), the rest of the article didn't have any useful info.
The NYT article mentioned Russia 4 times IIRC, and had two half sentances of useful info.
Reuters only mentioned Russia once (hooray!), and actually had a reasonable amount good detail in there.
It pays well to do a 'deep dive' on something like the Syrian conflict, to better understand how the media /really/ works, then the lessons learned can be re-applied going forward. I spent some time studying the initial OPCW report, and independently came to the same conclusion that the OPCW leaks did. A few independent journalists, including Robert Fisk, shed light on some of the other aspects.
A more recent matter is the initial denials of the efficacy of face masks in helping reduce the spread of coronavirus. This was done largely for political reasons IMHO, and became part of advice that was muddled, illogical, and inconsistent.
The best source of advice was highly ranked medical experts in countries that had successfully dealt with SARS, their advice was clear, logical and consistent, right from the beginning back in late Jan. Of course for some reason they're almost never featured in western media, who prefer some celebrity GP or health adviser who's only real interest seems to be their appearence fee!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/video_and_audio/headlines/5188155...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcbJdRb6mds
It makes sense if you consider modern news a form of entertainment which is arguably is.
The media report on it, but this is hardly something I can properly investigate myself.
A domain where they thrive is domestic politics and in such a small country it's not that difficult to verify whether they lie and manipulate or not.
It’s not a matter of verifying the accuracy, I’m curious if it was reported on at all. The OPCW was the driving force behind Central European foreign policy on Syria which has included everything from arming militias through to sanctions. This conflict has also exposed Central Europe to dozens of terrorist attacks and threatened the safety of everyone. This is arguably one of the biggest leaks about international corruption in the last decade.
So I’m curious if the media there has made much of a fuss with the exposé of OPCW producing falsified reports. American media hasn’t, neither has British or Australian media. But we already know those groups are corrupt.
With this I’m trying to find out (and so can you) if Central European media is as objective (and independent) as what it’s being made out to be.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but this line indicates to me that there's likely bias involved in the media you described:
>Basically the only people who find the largest publications "bad" here are conspiracy nuts, fascists and politicians involved in uncovered corruption scandals.
Something that seems to be quite common in modern media is to paint anybody who disagrees as a conspiracy theorist or fascist. Are there truly no other groups who have grievances with the news? Communists? The opposition party? Another news outlet that is partisan? It seems unlikely to me that only the groups that modern (left-leaning) media likes to blame everything on would have a problem with it.
On another point, I wish to address this:
>Our newspapers don't force their views on their journalists. The bosses require quality and factfulness, but topics are up to the journalist.
You don't need to control what a journalist writes to create biased news. You simply need to control who you hire. Want a news organization that's biased towards right wingers? Hire a bunch of right wingers to be your staff. They will naturally gravitate towards stories that are biased.
>The financial incentive is to continue to hold their image, because they live from subscription fees paid by people who view them as essential for our society.
The same is true for a lot of biased news outlets elsewhere. It still doesn't change that people like reading news that affirms their view of the world.
I don't wish to be uncharitable, but I believe based on this that perhaps you don't notice much of the bias. I could be wrong, but it just seems very difficult to believe that Europe has such a gem hidden in it. The news in my European country aren't quite as bad as in the US, but they're certainly not unbiased and politics certainly involves the media.